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THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

February 5, 1998

REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
AT NATIONAL PRAYER BREAKFAST

International Ballroom
Washington Hilton

9:11 A.M. EST

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. Thank you very
much to my good friend and sometimes golfing partner, Senator Akaka,
to all the members of Congress here, Reverend Graham, other head
table guests, ladies and gentlemen, especially to the organizers of
this wonderful event.

For five years now, Hillary and I have looked forward to
this day. For me it's a day in which I can be with other people of
faith and pray and ask for your prayers, both as President and as
just another child of God. I have done it for five years, and I do
so again today.

At each of these breakfasts, from our shared experiences
and our prayers, God's grace always seems to come, bringing strength
and wisdom and peace. Today I come more than anything else to say
thank you. First, thank you, Connie Mack, for your wonderful message
and the power of your example. I also thank all of you here for many
things in the last five years and ask your help in helping us to work
together to make our nation better, and the work that God has sent me
to do and you to do.

I thank you for helping me to strike blows for religious
liberty -- with the work so many of you in this room have done to
help us to protect the rights of federal employees, to follow their
faith at work, our students in school. In particular, I want to
thank Reverend Don Argue, the former President of the National
Association Evangelicals and Rabbi Arthur Schneier and the Roman
Catholic Archbishop of Newark, Theodore McCarrik, who next week will
go to China to look into religious practices there and to begin a
dialogue there in hopes that a part of our relationship with China
will be about our concern for the kind of religious liberty we have
practiced here this morning. (Applause).

I thank so many of you in the community of faith who
have worked with the government in partnership to help move poor
families from welfare from welfare to work, to honor the scripture
that our friend Dorothy Height read today. And I ask more of you to
join in. I thank those of you who have been responsible for working
with me -- and I see Senator Grassley out there and Harris Wofford is
here -- to bring communities of faith into the circle of national
service.

We now have 5,000 young Americans working with religious
organizations earning the Americorps scholarship to go to college
with after they serve with their community of faith wherever they
live in America. And the Congress has provided for many more
positions, and I ask you to help us to enlist more young Americans to
give meaning to their lives, to live out their faith, and to help
make our country a better place.

I thank you for the prayers, the letters, the scriptural
instruction that I have gotten from so many of you and many others
around this country in recent weeks and indeed in the last five
years. And I ask that they continue.

Finally, I couldn't help thinking when Connie Mack was
talking that what we all need very much is to take what we feel when
we're here every year and keep it close with us when we leave here
every year -- day in and day out, week in and week out, in good times
and bad. And I ask for your help in that.

We have a difficult decision we are facing now, as a
country and our administration, because of the concern all Americans
have that we not expose our children, if we can help it, to the
dangers of chemical and biological warfare. And last night I came
across a scripture verse that a friend of mine sent me in the last 72
hours that I had not had the chance to read -- a prayer of King
Solomon that I ask you to keep in mind as we face this decision.
Solomon said in 1Kings, "I am only a little child, and I do not know
how to carry out my duties. Your servant is here among people you
have chosen -- a great people -- to numerous to count or number. So
give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people and to
distinguish between right and wrong, for who is able to govern this
great people of yours."

I ask also for your prayers as we work together to
continue to take our country to higher ground and to remember the
admonition of Micah, which I try to repeat to myself on a very
regular basis. I ask your prayers that I and we might act justly and
love mercy and walk humbly with our God. Thank you very much.
(Applause).